Dilip Chhabria Plans Design Studio Chains Countrywide

Dilip Chhabria, chairman and managing director, said his company will open a chain of six studios in the first phase. He was speaking after the inauguration of his studio in Mumbai. Apart from Delhi and Jaipur, the new outlets would come up in Nagpur, Ludhiana, and Bangalore.

He said a three-seater customised small car 'l'il' priced at around Rs 1.60 to 1.75 lakh would be launched by the next year. "We are ready with five prototypes of l'il, which are undergoing evaluation tests to be completed by March 2001," he added.

Chhabria said the size of the Indian auto design business could grow to around Rs 500 crore over the next couple of years. Even major auto companies such as Mahindra & Mahindra has latched on to the bandwagon with its customised model Quadro built on the Classic platform.

 

"We are looking at picking up a large chunk in this emerging market," Chhabria added. Currently, the global auto design industry is worth around $200 billion.

To further its plans, the company will shortly undertake an aggressive marketing plan to get the global concept styling, prototyping and downstream activity support like CIAD/ CAD/ CAM for automotive and other industrial applications.

The outlets will showcase products like customized cars, recreational vehicles, speciality vehicles and other non-automotive related products like computer tables and other products.

The 500-employee strong company, which has skills, infrastructure and installed capacity at Silvassa is offering innovative designs to automotive manufacturers such as Tata Engineering, M&M, Ashok Leyland, Maruti Udyog, Toyota and Ford. The add-on kits for these vehicles range from Rs 3,500 to Rs 24 lakh.

Chhabria said: "Through our proprietary design centre, we ensure that our kits and stand-alone accessories are specifically designed and researched to complement the vehicle. They are not in the realm of generic imports sourced from central south-east Asian countries, which is why we are confident that we will not short change the Indian customer while giving him a cost-effective, more individualistic design of world standards."